Who Could That Be at This Hour? by Lemony Snicket

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw

Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Maas

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie

Where She Went by Gayle Forman

If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Story of My Life by Jay McInerney

Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patton

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

The Vicar of Nibbleswick by Roald Dahl

girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

I picked up this book based on the cover. Old school library sleeve? Mossy green muted color? Trailer park (including a few telephone poles!)? I checked it out based on the quotes (rookie mistake...I should know better.) and reading the first page.

Nearly 3 weeks later, I was still struggling to finish this one. After breezing through the first 64 pages, putting me way beyond my 50 page rule, I went days without even cracking it open.

Rory Dawn lives on the Calle, a trailer park outside of Reno, with her bartender mother. Eventually RD discovers the history of her family goes way beyond the stories she's heard countless times. Years of personal and physical abuse combined with a failing economic and social system leave Rory convinced that she's alone and destined to follow suit.

There are moments of poignancy and celebration, when Rory seeks to be a Girl Scout and then excels during the spelling bee, but even then there is a spirit of doom carried by this protagonist. Mired in a seemingly inevitable darkness, it was hard for me to finish this one.

Anchor Book of Short Stories

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

In One Person by John Irving

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney

A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

If Only by Carole Geithner

Looking for Alaska by John Green

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

Places I Never Meant to Be edited by Judy Blume

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord

Wonder Struck by Brian Selznick

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

The Great House by Nicole Krauss

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Written on the Body By Jeannette Winterson

Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook by Charles Bukowski

Things About Me by Marcel the Shell

The View from Saturday by EL Kloningsberg

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Soft Place to Land

Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me

Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

Bonk by Mary Roach

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Slowness by Milan Kundera

The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson

As this was a National Book Award Finalist, I read a review of this one that made it seem like our bookclub would love it. We didn't. Very similar to Bent Road...to the point that a few months later we had a conversation where we all tried to recall which characters were from which book. Middle-America-family-drama type stuff here. Good for passing the time, but not the Irving/Cunningham-caliber of writing that I was expecting. Apparently, these particular quotes and excerpts stirred something in me at one point...

"The individual and the state, the individual as unwilling participant in the state. The self existed among the great confusion of other selves, each of us, all of us, the cells in the body politic. The political animal. A shuffling, shambling, bearlike creature, sometimes lurching forward, at other times gnawing and swatting at its own troubled innards."

"It wasn't fair. Maybe when you were a child, or for a little while longer, you thought that as soon as you pointed unfairness out, a swift and righteous justice would prevail."

"He didn't feel like dredging it up, explaining. How naive he'd been, naive being a nicer way of saying dumb, to think that ideas could protect you from the world's catastrophes, or from cruelty or unfairness or your own vanity."

"...It was better when the church was crowded and they had to sit in the balcony, where you could at least look down on people and imagine yourself parachuting on top of them. ...nothing you could do to keep from being eaten up and digested by your boredom. ...he didn't know why they weren't all embarrassed. Everything about church was profoundly embarrissing to him, as if religion was something that only took place in the most unnatural circumstantces."

Heartbeat by Sharon Creech

Wowza. The last half of 2011 wasn't an awesome stretch of reading and writing time for me. While the documentation of titles and book covers was on track with my reading, I never quite got around to summarizing or reviewing. You know what they say about good intentions. They say that Jill is a procrastinator. Instead of living under the delusion that I'll "eventually" come back to write on those titles, I'm simply posting what I have saved in my drafts. If there's something you want to ask about, let me know....AND if you're looking to read anything, shoot me an email. When I moved in February, I packed up 5 boxes of books for donations. I've been on a hot streak of reading these past few weeks (mostly young adult lit), and am hoping to continue it, as well as follow suite with my writing. A girl can dream.




I've now read this book 4 times, made copies of appropriate pages for my students, posted poems on bulletin boards and profusely gushed about Sharon Creech for the past 3 years or so.

This is a story about a 13 year old girl who loves to run. Annie is just now figuring out how to run because she loves it, and whether or not it's possible to express and share that kind of passion with other people.

Annie runs with her friend Max, and talks a bit about running with her Grandpa. Told in story verse, we also see Annie connect with her community and explore her other talents. Her year-long art project of 100 drawings of the same apple is a thread that ties many lessons together for the reader, just as young Annie unfolds these truths herself.